FAQ

What companies do you cover?

These include all public companies in the U.S. as well as large and mid-cap international companies across 23 Developed Markets and 24 Emerging Markets countries, covering approximately 85% of the global investable equity opportunity set.

How are stories scored either positively or negatively?

Natural language processing (NLP) software is used to “read” articles, to categorize items, and positive and negative sentiments are gleaned from the writing. On Truvalue Lab’s 100-point scale, positive stories are scored above 50, and negative stories below 50. And, yes, we do extrapolate signals to decimal places.

In practice, positive events above 50 could be a negative contributor to total company performance, if the long-term Insight score prior to the new score was at a higher level. The inverse is true for negative events.

Each company’s overall performance is expressed in visual form on Truvalue Lab’s charting functions. That allows for the impact of the day’s news to be easily interpreted compared to prior performance with a glance.

What ESG or sustainability categories are tracked by Truvalue Labs?

Truvalue Labs provides an overall score and sustainability trend, as well as specific performance for individual categories. The Truvalue Labs Standard Edition has 14 categories which selected based on widely-accepted industry norms. SASB Edition uses new standards from the industry-leading Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. These categories are defined by SASB, and the categories considered material to financial performance vary by industry.

How does Insight360 evaluate materiality of ESG data? Is it made by SASB?

Truvalue Labs is independent, but partnered with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) to develop Truvalue Labs SASB Edition. This product delivers timely and material ESG Insights using the SASB standards, which is widely considered the industry standard for identifying material sustainability issues by industry.

Truvalue Labs has integrated the SASB Materiality Map standards into Insight360. SASB’s Materiality Map standards includes 5 Sustainability Dimensions and 30 General issue Categories, which make up SASB’s universe of ESG issues. Underlying each general issue category is a set of industry-specific sustainability disclosure topics in SASB standards.

To better categorize companies that share similar resource intensity, as well as sustainability risks and opportunities, SASB created the Sustainable Industry Classification System™ (SICS™). At the highest level SICS has 10 vertical sectors and at its most granular level there are 79 industries. Truvalue Labs has integrated SICS into SASB Edition, therefore all 8,000+ companies covered in the tool have been mapped to a SICS Sector and Industry.

What are your data sources?

Truvalue Labs taps into an ocean of real-time big data to produce ESG scores and analytics including charts. More than 1 million signals per month are gleaned from 100,000+ sources around the web, and paywalled sources from LexisNexis.

Our curated sources are vetted by a content and data team of ESG experts like the former head of research at SASB and ESG analysts, who follow a rigorous process to deliver you the most relevant ESG view of companies’ ESG performance with an external, or outside, perspective.

This means that we help complete your company ESG view with information that you can’t find on a financial terminal, including information from industry-specific publications, non-company reported regulatory filings, news reports, government agency studies, trade blogs, ESG thought leader-shared Twitter articles and reports from watchdog groups and NGO organizations. To illustrate this further, a few examples of industry-specific sources include: Automotive News, CleanTechnica, Pharma Live, Solar Industry, Hydrocarbon, and Fierce Telecom.

In addition and separate from our scoring and charts based on qualitative natural language items, Truvalue Labs also offers more traditional ESG metric datasets in the platform and via integration parts for a complete view of ESG performance.

How far back does Truvalue Labs data exist?

Truvalue Labs’ Data Service offers historical data back to January 1, 2007 for U.S. companies. We are actively adding historical data for non-U.S. company data, which currently dates back to January 1, 2015.

How are stories chosen by Truvalue Labs and brought into the system?

Truvalue Labs uses proprietary web-scraping technology to scan more than 100,000 English-language websites a day, gathering more than 1 million data points per month.

As Insight360 scans the web, it picks up stories based on natural language processing, looking for company names and language relevant to ESG categories.

Who has access to my data?

Security has been considered at the foundational level of Truvalue Labs. The privacy of your data is our top concern, and we have designed our security systems to be best-in-class.

All data is kept secure at the account level within silos; no other customer has access to your data, portfolios, or customizations. Within accounts, custom user permissions provide control over how data can be modified, allowing for varying parameters for different roles (such as read-only access).